...when your book sales are impressive. It gets a little tougher when you’re making just enough coin to equal minimum wage in, say, Bhutan. Yes, you and you are Bhutan experts but for the new visitors to the Blog-O-Rama, the ones foolishly hoping to find a review of Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, know that beginning wage-earners in Bhutan expect to collect 100 Bhutanese ngultrum each or, roughly, $1.92 US at the current exchange rate.

Want the truth? Most self-published writers hope to make the Bhutanese day rate but they don’t care to share this info with the rest of us. (We’re not talking about the hotshots in the biz. Joe Konrath, John Locke, and Amanda Hocking have truckloads of readers and they provide sales updates frequently. Good for them, and may their successes continue to grow. But it doesn’t take a bucket of courage to say, “Made SO MUCH money this month. Must buy new wheelbarrow to carry my doubloons to the bank.”) So we’re always interested when a not-Locke comes along and shares their personal self-publishing sales figures.

Someone such as Michele Lee. No, not the singer/dancer/actress that Harrell thought was a major hottie in The Love Bug. This is a different hottie with a similar but differently-spelled first name. On her website, M.L. discussed her experience when she self-pubbed a set of “equestrian-themed erotic romances” under her pen name, M. Lush (like us, she openly shares her real name. Unlike us, she’s smart enough to use different names for different story genres). The stories are short (12-15K)…or, almost exactly the same length as our upcoming December publication. She sells them cheap, at $.99 US or 51.58 ngultrum, exactly the same price we’ll be asking for our mystery. Private Lessons has a hot woman on the cover – a key marketing ingredient in our plan to movie copies of our-to-be-novella – and it’s the first in a series – just like our newest effort.

Most importantly, Michele’s not so much into doing major self-promotion. As she writes, “I’m positive my sales would be better if I was self promoting better, if I was more established/well known as a writer, and if I went around on self publishing boards begging people to buy my book or promising to buy their book if they bought mine. But I wanted a more honest idea of how things sold without spin/self promo/bullshit.”

Since we plan to do exactly as little promotion as possible for our Private Investigator story -- if you’re not one of the four people who wander past MarsNeedsWriters, you’re not going to see anything -- we were pleased to see her series of graphs, clearly illustrating her sales numbers. You can see it, too, right here.

M.L. isn’t doing badly, truly, she just isn’t in clover. As you’ll see on her own site, her upcoming UF novel won’t be an indie affair, it’s launching from Koehler-Hintz Publishers (their Violet Ivy Press line)…and we hope she’ll share her experience with them, too.

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Renée & Harrell

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We aren't kidding about the wine.This is where we talk about writing... ...our writing, mostly. We also discuss kiva.org, Hunting Monsters Press, the magic bakery, self-publishing, pseudonyms, life itself -- a bunch of things.